Epilogue
by wikiaddicted723
Summary: "Olivia doesn't want a replacement, never that. What she wants is the chance to do things right and not have everything blow up in her face. Time. That's all she asks. She figures the universe owes her a timeline or two." Post series, now AU.


A/N: this was written late last year for the fringe exchange, and thus is now wildly AU. Life prevented me from polishing this one as much as I would've liked, but my beta is still awesome and that will never change. All mistakes are mine. Let me know what you thought!

* * *

"Not only are there no happy endings,' she told him, 'there aren't even any endings."

— Neil Gaiman, _American Gods_

Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us.

These, our bodies, possessed by light.

Tell me we'll never get used to it.

—Richard Siken, _Scheherazade_

* * *

"I can hear you thinking," he murmurs, voice sleep-rough and worried, lips soft against her throat as he mouths the words. They've been pretending to sleep for —she looks at the clock on the wall— five hours now. The ass end of dawn peeks through the blinders they didn't bother to close, crisp and cold, but warming.

They don't sleep anymore. There's no bed in this place but their daughter's, a bed neither is willing to mention for fear that it'd feel too much like lying down on her grave, on the bones they'll never find, of the little girl and the young woman they weren't given enough time to know, to love, to mourn. They use the couch instead, wide and worn and comfortable enough, in front of an old rusty fireplace that makes Olivia smile a sad sort of smile every time. Some things Etta carried in blood, legacies she didn't ask for. Of them all, an inherited fondness for fire seems almost harmless now.

_Your sense of humor took a dive, _she'd say just to answer, to let him know she's still real, remind him that he's not insane, not dead, not in some nightmare. She'd say it, just to answer, were it a joke or a figure of speech, but his meaning is literal. It's a consequence, one of the more harmless, of what he did to himself for the sake of revenge, before she shut the tech down the way she disarmed The Machine what feels like a lifetime ago. She was just in time, but was not fast enough. He can hear her think, but cannot pick out definite thoughts, just emotion, the gist of whatever notion she might entertain. It's confusing, he says, neither here nor there. She still doesn't know how she's supposed to deal with that. How they're supposed to deal with anything really.

How many times have they been here, at the end of the world?

It's a rhetorical question, of course. She remembers them all, could count them on one hand if she tried, if she thought them all victories. Some days she wishes she could forget, but only some days (the rest of the time she chooses to remember that she's been there already, that it brought nothing but grief to all parties included).

"I know, I'm sorry," she tells him instead, whispering because the dark seems to demand it of her. It hurts him, some times, if he's conscious and she thinks too hard. He still hasn't learned to untangle his thoughts from hers and its too much on his brain if he keeps it up for long stretches of time.

She kisses his temple, cards her hand through his hair until he hums, pleased, his head pressing down on the slope of muscle between her shoulder and neck, where he rests on her the way Etta used to, at eighteen months, twenty days; the way Etta used to, twenty two years, seven months and fifteen days ago. "Try to sleep," she says. She'll be lucky if she catches a few hours herself.

They lie together, silent because there's nothing they haven't already said, because they learned the hard way how to share pain. And they lie like pieces pushed against each other, made to fit, his arm around her, heavy in its place across her chest, his thigh warm between hers, calf firm under her toes, her feet bare. Peter is bigger, heavier than their daughter ever was, his limbs longer and firmer, corded with muscle and shot through with memories of violence where Etta was giggles and soft baby flesh, but that is where the difference ends. She always had more of him in her.

_How many more times_, Olivia thinks, asks herself.

* * *

Take care of him, Walter'd begged in her ear, with blood in his mouth and the certainty of his soon-to-be absence as he held her hand. Take care of him, his eyes screamed at her, later, in the field of flying debris where the world ended.

"As many atoms in the human body as there are stars in the sky," his mouth said instead, and she didn't know, couldn't remember because she wasn't there (a timeline and little more than two decades ago), that those where the words of a man walking to greet death like the meeting was long overdue. Peter remembered. Peter made to run, shouting, wanting to push Walter out of the way, maybe even take his place until she tackled him, falling to the ground under his momentum, his weight.

"I can't lose you, too!" the roaring of the air had forced her to yell. Olivia clutched him to her, clawed at his jacket, his chest. _Not again_ was implicit, went unsaid. _You promised_ was an afterthought, an echo of vows he'd spoken only to her, in a fort made of blankets one cold night in Vermont, two months after watching her die on a boat to keep the world from ending. To keep the world from ending _again_, she should say.

There was no body to bury, after, his matter disintegrated all around them, consumed in powering the device that would complete their master plan. There would be no bones in his grave either, like the dead she carries around with her every day: John, Charlie, Henrietta. Perhaps he'd never intended to have one. It would be just like Walter, the madman, the genius, the father, to have planned it all from the start. One final act to show the value of a human life, to show the universe where to shove it the next time.

She found it fitting then, as she finds it fitting now, that a man would give his life to fix the world he'd broken, once. Cruel, but fitting. She'd not voiced the thought, had known it would be an unwelcome echo of his own. Instead, she'd held him, wiped his tears with the backs of her hands and coaxed him to speak, to share with her his memories, the depth of his grief (she's learned this lesson already). They'd both lost a father, him more than her, but he was Walter. She owed him everything, the good and the bad, even this man, this lost boy in her arms.

As always, the time to mourn was little, cut short by the pressing matters of a newly freed society, used to absolute order and plunged into chaos. Fringe Division took matters into their own hands, became a provisional government with the aid of Resistance cells across the country. The loyalists, now pardoned, fractured. Some joined the Division, too used to military command to break out of the habit, taking orders as ingrained as breathing, as hunger. The rest disbanded, dispersed, went back to the homes taken from them and rebuilt.

They're all still rebuilding. They'll be at it a while.

Every morning except on the weekends, Olivia checks in at the federal building, signs papers, hears pleads for forgiveness and pledges. Broyles is preparing to retire, will do so the moment there's a government in place, a new president elected. He tells her he wants no one but her to replace him. Grudgingly, and because he asks nicely and Peter smiles like he_ knows_, Olivia says yes. When they need her, she goes out in the field, leads men who look at her dumbstruck, like she's some sort of hero. She doesn't like it one bit, misses the early days when she was just the cold bitch in the boys' club stuck with the bovine inhabited freak show, along with the lunatic, the criminal, and the green junior agent with a saint's patience (who still has enough to sort through Walter's possessions, his files, his life, and put it all in their archives, that they might find it useful someday). In her experience, there are no heroes, just victims.

Peter has enlisted Massive Dynamic's resources in rebuilding. They've done a lot already with cleaning the city, restoring the park. The air polluting device was completely dismantled within the first three months, but there's still a lot to be done, a lot of muscle required. Olivia knows he took the job because physical exertion keeps his mind from wandering off, from looking to hard. There's a rigidity to his movements sometimes, an unnatural speed to his reflexes when he's too focused on one particular task, an ease with calculations and probabilities that exceeds what he could do with his natural genius before. He fears it, fears himself and what he's capable of.

When he does sleep, he never fails to wake up with a start and a cold sweat, grabbing at her as if she'll slip through his fingers like sand the moment he loosens his hold. She never minds. She'll talk to him, her voice soothing and low, giving him something to focus on outside of his thoughts; she'll take his hand and press it to her cheek, where he can feel her warmth under his palm as she smooths her fingertips over his eyebrows, the bridge of his nose, the arch of his cheekbone. It relaxes him. Part of her thinks it's a feedback loop, that it relaxes him because it relaxes her—his touch has always been soothing.

Take care of him, Walter begged, when he had no need to. With the world well into fixing and him gone, and Etta gone, what else does she have left to save? Who else does she have left to love?

* * *

Peter sleeps, eventually. The next time he wakes is a little after ten a.m. and Olivia aches from lying on her back without moving all night, from his weight pulling her down, down. His sleep was even, calm. It's a welcome change, both for him and her. She took a catnap or two herself, never quite asleep, never quite awake.

"Good morning," she says. Olivia shifts, turns, leaning back against the cushions until she's far enough away that she can see his face.

"Mmm…yeah, it is." He presses a kiss to her neck.

Light streams in continuously through the windows, interrupted by dusty blinders that stopped being white some time in the last ten years. It bounces off the metallic vase on the table in the corner, five steps away from the crown of her head, the one with the tulips she's always liked. It reflects in the yellowing spots on the walls where the light blue plaster's peeled away from the drywall and the brick. The building, old and broken as it is, refuses to crumble, stands firm. There's a metaphor in there somewhere, she's sure.

Peter is looking at her, eyelids half-mast, irises murky. She knows he's wondering, trying to guess at what she's so often been thinking about, not daring to ask. He's made a life out of waiting her out. She's not sure she's ready to tell him, is even less sure that he's ready to hear it, but if not now, when?

"I've been thinking," she says, tentative, looking down at the meet of his collarbones right above the sternum, watching his throat work through the shadow of his stubble and below, at the collar of his shirt that is so thin from washing it is almost threadbare.

"You don't say," Peter intones, voice dry, eyes warm.

Olivia looks up, smiles a little, places a hand on his chest. "I'm serious, Peter. I think I want to try again. Maybe…maybe not now, but later, when we're…better, when the world's better. I want us to try again."

He pauses before speaking, thinks. He doesn't need to ask what it is she wants to try. "You think that's safe?" he says, his tone curious. She searches his face, looks for traces of reluctance, of regret, but his eyes are shuttered, features carefully set, composed. There's something stubborn in the set of his jaw, something sad in the shadows of his brow, so like Walter, so endearingly _Etta_, that it makes her heart clench. Olivia doesn't want a replacement, never that. What she wants is the chance to do things right and not have everything blow up in her face.

Time. That's all she asks. She figures the universe owes her a timeline or two.

"I don't know. To be honest, I'm not sure I care." Olivia props her head up on her hand. "I suppose I'm just tired of—of second guessing myself all the time. I feel like all I've ever done is hold my breath until the next catastrophe, until someone else gets the grand idea of bringing forth the apocalypse with horsemen and everything, until I'm needed, because it was the thing that I was made to do, and I don't want my life to be like that. I don't want to waste it waiting. Unless you don't want to. Try, I mean." The possibility scares her.

"You've had that on your mind for a while, huh?" Peter smiles, the shape of his mouth indulgent, the crow's feet on his cheeks sincere (when did they get old, she wonders).

"Yeah," she breathes.

"Sweetheart," he says, and he hasn't called her that in so long that she closes her eyes, holds her breath. "I'd love to try with you."

What the future may hold, Olivia doesn't know. This once, she refuses to care.


End file.
